Okay, I have been mentioning a problem we had with Amazon.co.uk before Xmas and here it is. This weeks edition of IT Week (9th January 2006) has printed my email which I sent to IT Sneak, the publication's resident IT industry muck-raker. Below is what was printed:


Not all Amazon customers miss out on fun and games, of course. Take reader Ian Vincent and spouse: "I ordered Christmas presents from Amazon and a few days later, whilst attempting to use the same card, was surprised to find it over it's limit. As two of the Amazon orders had been refused, we shifted them to my wife's card - only to be advised hours later that this was now over the limit too. After many hours of phone calls we learned that Amazon had been starting multiple transactions against the cards but not completing them. We had to wait a week for the transactions to time out. Great timing, a couple of weeks before Christmas with presents, food and petrol to buy!"

This is a pretty well edited (to fit the magazine column) extract from my original email that I sent to them. Okay I will accept that this would seem to be a minor irritation to most people, although it must be a worrying concern on the robustness of Amazon's underlying technology, but this was a very stressful experience. It would have been bad enough at any time of the year but at least then we would have had some funds available in our bank account. However because we knew we were going to be doing a lot of online shopping at Xmas, we decided to move pretty much all of our available cash onto my Credit Card, so we could take advantage of the securities these cards give you. In an instant Amazon essentially took all of this money away from us and this is just not money for presents for my kids (which is bad enough, it is probably the most important time of the year in their eyes) but it was also money to pay for petrol to get the kids to school (we live in a rural area without public transport to school for Cara) and even more important to pay for the essentials in life i.e. food, and four kids eat a lot. Luckily I had expanded my bankroll playing Poker this year and was able to take out some money from that to help. Also thankfully, the cards became clear JUST in time for Xmas to be covered.
All of this has been caused by a complete failure of Amazon's systems, a failure that my finances are currently still recovering from. I have been a customer of Amazon for a very very long time, I first purchased JMS's Book on Scriptwriting from them in around 1994. I have recently been a customer of their DVD rental scheme. All of this is no longer the case, Play are now my preferred source for Audio/Book/Video and I am looking at signing up with Screenselect for my DVD rental. Amazon....never more.